Quantum Oddities

Quantum physics seeks to explain the physical micro-processes that occur at very small levels of metric scale. And these processes involve phenomena that are highly unusual when regarded from the vantage point of the familiar macro-level of physical reality. Specifically, the anomalous phenomena at issue include such oddities as:

• –Probabilism and impredictability, as when we encounter such processes as the radical decay of heavy transuranic elements, occurrences predictable with statistical probabilities on the larger scale, but individually unpredictable.

• –Complementary uncertainty of physical state parameters with a see-saw relation where the more precise specification of one constrains the other into greater unspecifiability.

• –Position-ambiguity via an infeasibility of specifying the precise location of physical processes and providing for continuity in physical interactions.

• –State superposition with different quantum states combining or conjoining otherwise incompatible possibilities in an impenetrable fog of indetermination.

• –Wave-packet collapse with observation presenting a definiteness that physical theory does not provide for and indeed disallows.

All such eventualities are “something completely different” from what we encounter in the course of commonplace experience. In the physics of the macro-objects we encounter in everyday life we have transactions that are subject to lawful determination, physical parameters that assume definite values not subject to probabilistic variation, descriptively different states that are disjoined and incomparable, and state-conditions that evolve in smooth continuity and are not disjointed in abrupt inexplicability. At the physical macro-level where we humans standardly function things thus behave very differently.

Schrödinger's Cat and the Basic Problem Posed by the Quantum Theory

Reality at the quantum level enjoys a dramaturgy of its own. The everyday reality of our experience yields observationally definite resolutions, whereas quantum theory can at most provide for probabilistically indefinite alternatives: quantum waves functioning with smooth regularity among alternative possibilities in line with Schrödinger's Equation unless and until observation intervenes to disrupt matters a the theory-inexplicable collapse to a single alternatives. This so-called “wave-packet” collapses when issue arises in the curious thought-experiment of Schrödinger's Cat.

This thought experiment is predicated on the following suppositions. At time t the cat is placed in an opaque box containing an apparatus that potentially produces a quantum event triggering the release of a jet of cyanide gas sufficient to kill the cat. But no further changes occur in the box subsequently.